Sand Technology Systems International Inc, Montreal, Quebec, is hoping to leap onto the data warehousing bandwagon following its license deal with Hitachi Data Systems Corp to distribute Sand’s Nucleus Enterprise Server in the US, Canada and Australia. Nucleus Enterprise is a relational database management system and query engine for local area networks, with a difference, says Sand. It is ideally suited to the type of very large, unstructured queries spawned by the availability of masses of data. The Nucleus technology uses a different form of data storage from traditional databases. Conventional database systems store data as a sequence of records. Relational databases comprise collections of tables, with columns and rows. All are stored as identically-structured records on disk, one after another. This puts overhead on query and retrieval of data, in terms of large input-output requirements and indexing schemes. Nucleus uses a column-oriented approach to data storage, and separates data values from their use in tables, using bit map arrays. The main criticism of bit map indexing has been that it takes up a lot of space. However Sand has patented a bit map encoding technology, or bit map vectoring, to compress the bit maps, which enables searches to run without decompression. Sand says massive queries have been reduced in the order of down to three hours from 36 hours, and input-output overhead is significantly reduced. The company says conventional approaches to the problem tend to opt for parallelization, which increases the hardware requirement. It said that Nucleus, by reducing the amount of input-output, obviates the need for such parallelization and therefore requires less hardware. The company likens the product to any of the well-known relational database management systems such as Oracle or Sybase, but said that it also has an integrated search engine comparable with Sybase IQ. Sand’s vice-president of finance, Susan Waxman, said Nucleus Enterprise Server is currently installed in customer test sites and should be with 12 customers by the end of the year. Sand Technology, which employs only six people in Canada and six in Pasadena, California, has a joint marketing venture with Hitachi Data Systems in Canada, which is 60% owned by Hitachi and 40% by Sand, and one in the US. The Canadian joint venture originally sold tapes and disk drives in the mainframe market and latterly markets Hitachi Ltd mainframes. However, Sand admits the Canadian mainframe market has all but died and the nail in its coffin is the currency exchange rate. It therefore looks to the Nucleus Enterprise Server for future business. Nucleus currently runs on Digital Equipment Corp Alpha machines, but the company said it will run on any 64-bit Unix systems as they become available – Sand is currently talking to Silicon Graphics Inc. However, with only 12 employees, Ms Waxman admits Sand, which is developing the product, has quite a lot on its plate. She says DEC is seriously interested in installing Nucleus as standard on its network servers, and believes once it is tried and tested in the US, Hitachi Ltd will be interested in the product for the Japanese market. Once the US, Canadian and Australian markets have taken off, Ms Waxman said that Sand will look to sell Nucleus Enterprise Server in Europe.
